Ten Coolest Eclipse 3.2 Features

By Matt Stephens

07/25/2006

Eclipse 3.2 was catapulted into the stratosphere recently (okay, released), along with the other projects that make up the Callisto synchronized-release effort. To celebrate, Eclipse evangelist Ed Burnette put together a list of the 10 coolest features in this new release.

One rather neat feature, which will be welcomed by API authors, is the ability to create a refactoring script so that users of your API can automatically bring their code in line with your latest interface changes.

The CVS Quick Diff annotations are also useful. Checking the differences between versioned files can be a slow and clunky process, especially if you have to click your way through your version control system’s own (usually painful) UI. But with Eclipse’s Quick Diff feature, “diffing” is now a simple case of hovering the mouse over a bar on the left-hand side of the editor.

Eclipse 3.2 also introduces something that NetBeans has had since year “dot”, an abstracted Filesystem API. Good to see it, though.

These are all incremental improvements, of course, but put together into one, along with all the other tweaks and developments, they make for a much more usable and productive IDE.